“What I’m Reading Now…” at Tarpaulin Sky

Click here to see an annotated reading list of five recent poetry books that I find notable. My blurbs are framed with a bit of political commentary that tries to show the social and cultural relevance of contemporary poetry during these dark and confusing times. The books are Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (Graywolf, 2017), Divya Victor’s Kith (Fence, 2017), Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (Knopf, 2015), Solmaz Sharif’s Look (Graywolf, 2016), and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift (Nightboat, 2014).

About:

Michael Leong’s poetry career began in the sixth grade when he won his first poetry prize in Mr. Harrison’s class for a haiku about a snake. Since then, he has received degrees in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Rutgers University and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in journals such as Hotel Amerika, Interim, jubilat, Lana Turner, and New American Writing and have been anthologized in The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing (Lake Forest College Press, 2013), and Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). He is the author of four volumes of poetry, e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009), Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012), Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?(Fence Digital, 2017), and Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018), as well as a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat,I, the Worst of All (BlazeVOX [books], 2009). His monograph Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in Spring 2020. He works in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts.

Contact: michael.c.leong@gmail.com

Pages

Books:

Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018)

[“Working out a necessary and constantly evolving counterintuition–uneasy, agitated, restless and ceaselessly inventive–Michael Leong’s Words on Edge clocks the alarm of those who ‘wake late’ in a world of fragments and found materials. Bricoleur of the ‘jagged, ad hoc equation’ that is the contemporary, the poet constellates a spacious, ever-enlarging structure from a heap of broken posterities to make space for ‘the first blossoms of wild meaning.’ The assertions are fresh, tragicomic, and engaging, and the ongoing effort to accurately describe (and affect) a transforming situation is thrilling: this is work that leads us toward ‘a future collapse into / a full state of wakefulness.’ Don’t wait!” -Laura Mullen]

[“Michael Leong’s poetry is exquisite. We say something is exquisite when it is alluring and elegant, but also when it is razor-fine, when it has an edge, and that edge might be used to slice open a section of air and pull something out of it that hadn’t existed before, something that we did not know existed, something that existed outside of language and was conjured into being by an unorthodox employment of that very same language. This is called invention, and can lead to great and wonderful things, what André Breton would call the marvelous.” -John Olson]

[“Leong’s glowing hieroglyphs show that the poetic Word emerges––as irony from iron––from the whirled atoms of the World itself. Indeed, Leong redefines the space-time of the page as a furnace of pure imagination, where the cadaver of modernist poetics is smelted with black humor…” -Andrew Joron]

[“Recalling the poetry of Ginsberg, Lamat knows how to set words free.”
–Handbook of Latin American Studies]

Chapbooks:

Li Po Meets Oulipo (Belladonna*, 2015)

Fruits and Flowers and Animals and Lands and Seas Do Open (Burnside Review Press, 2015)

[Winner of the 2014 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest]

[“Michael Leong’s vocabulary is totally stuffed/ multiplying in mirrors/ scattered over hillsides/ bubbling right over the top, and he’s going to give it all to you—he’s generous. He’s generous and funny and a little troubled—and “a little troubled” is, of course, the most logical and authentic response we could hope for anyone who’s examining life and poetry and personhood and artist-ness. This book is so enjoyable—like I said, giving and funny, but also very unlike anything I’ve read lately. It promptly wins the reader over.” – Hannah Gamble]

Words on Edge (Plan B Press, 2012)

[Winner of the 2012 Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Contest]

[“This is work that rubs the found language of the web up against the language of the everyday world. Many of the forms are precise, inventive, and informed.” -Rob Fitterman]

[“…what particularly satisfies about Leong’s book is that the ‘cover version’ poems he produces, almost without exception, are really kind of beautiful and interesting in their own right, and go way beyond wacky or quirky into something rather pleasing and oddly profound.” -Chris Goode]